Summary on Battlegrounds Schools

In the book “Battleground Schools”, Susan Gerofsky discusses the progression of mathematical education within the last century. She discusses 3 reforms that occurred in mathematical learning in particular: the Progressivist Reform, New Math and Math Wars. Early in the 1900’s, the public started to realize that the traditional way of teaching “meaningless memorized procedures” was not ideal in student learning. The public started to realize that the students’ knowledge of mathematics was very narrow and only was meant to answer how rather than the why in problem solving. With the emergence of the need for technology, schools started to implement some of John Dewey’s work of allowing the students to discover mathematical education for themselves. The schools started to adopt an independent way of learning to broaden and personalize students’ ways of learning.
But by the 1960’s, the mathematical education turned into a competition as the Americans were worried about losing the space race. As a result, the curriculum was enhanced and the New Math reform began. The emphasis of this reform was to promote students from K-12 to have a larger mathematical capacity so that more of them may continue in university and hopefully create more of rocket scientist type of students. This came to the expense of the students who weren’t more inclined in math and also the teachers who did not have the math knowledge required to teach these subjects.
The Math Wars over the NCTM Standards era brought an end to the need to create rocket scientists but instead focused on “back-to-basics” way of reaching and learning math. This era of learning emphasized a national standard in learning followed y a standardized test. This would allow teachers to have more freedom in the way they taught their class but still allow all students to learn the same topics. This way of learning encouraged developing different ways of solving problems as to better understand a topic, being able to think about it in different forms. This reform has gotten opposition and support from many groups and to this day both groups are debating on this topic.